Spectravelers Sound Design Contest 2021 - Minh Ho

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Play, download and edit the free video Spectravelers Sound Design Contest 2021 - Minh Ho.

This was a LOT of fun to make.

In case you're interested, a description of my process - not in chronological order:

Big explosion [~05.5"]:
- I cut the small section of almost-white noise in the first 10 sec of the Hand Engine sample, boosted it by like 24 dB, and loaded it into a sampler. Several stages of bandpass filter and distortion. Very sharp AD envelope on volume, filter cutoff and distortion amount. An allpass filter to smear the transient and make it less clicky. Some transient shaping, clipping, multiband compression, more clipping.
- big reverberated 'braam': one of the 'whooshes' from the Television sample, in a sampler with some phase modulation. Then processed through SerumFX: a 'Reverb' filter with some drive and resonance, some stereo widening, some distortion. A bit of compression and Valhalla Shimmer, low diffusion & size, to 'smear' it and make it more ethereal. Played at two separate octaves to have thicker sound.
- body/'womp': same sampler patch as the transient, but the Q of the bandpass filters is exaggerated to the point where they start self-oscillating and create a sustained distorted tone. SerumFX's 'Reverb' filter again to give it a metallic quality, and several stages of filtering and distortion to shape the tone.
- sub: the Kitchen Hood sample filtered through a very narrow 96 dB/oct band-pass filter to produce a sine wave. Bounced it, added 45 dB of gain, and loaded it into a sampler with just a bit of distortion.
- pre-hit riser: the Television sample through Eventide Blackhole. The reverb size is modulated to create weird, airy pitch bends. On top of that, a 'reverse reverb' effect.

First hit [~01"]:
- 'Alarm' sound: I wanted a sort of call-and-answer between this moment and the big explosion, so I duplicated the patch from the body of the explosion and tweaked it to get a higher-pitched metallic 'womp'.
- Transient: a variation of the alarm with a sharp attack, cut very short. On top of that, a kick drum made from the Kitchen Hood sine wave to give it a bit of a low-end thud.
- Sub: same patch as the explosion sub, played higher.

Click sequence [~02"]:
- the clicks come from several sources, mostly the Samsung Tablet, the Car and the TV. Loaded into a sampler, played very low. On some layers, the samples are processed in iZotope RX to 'extract' the clicks before sampling them. On some of the layers, several stages of notch filters and distortion to give them some vocal/formant quality.
- weird 'vocal' bass at the beginning of the sequence: the Kitchen Hood sound with a bunch of modulation and distortion, pitch & frequency shifted. I then 'morphed' it with the click sequence using Zynaptiq Morph, and again added several stages of notch filters and distortion to make it 'talk'.

Small spark flying to the left [~04"]:
- the Television sound mangled with some modulation, pitch shift, frequency shift, distortion. There's a weird bend at the end because of a reverb size being modulated by an LFO.

Last riser before the logo [~08"]:
- the pitch-bending/tremolo bass comes from a variation of the big distorted bass made with the Hand Engine Motor 'white noise'. I tweaked the patch to have a different tone, bounced a long note, and loaded it into a granular sampler. Envelope on the grain size and pitch. Some distortion and filtering to shape the tone, and some stereo widening.
- the 'sizzly' textures in the mid frequencies are made with the Kitchen Hood sample. Some ring modulation to give them a fast, aggressive tremolo, and a lot of pitch/frequency shifting, distortion & filtering.
- in the very high frequencies, some glitchy textures obtained by destroying the Samsung Tablet sample in iZotope RX and then frequency shifting the result.

Glitchy sweep to the logo [~09"]:
- I had the Kitchen Hood and the Television loaded in a sampler and was toggling between the two (I can't remember which one made this specific sound), playing with the pitch, some phase modulation, frequency shifting, distortion, filtering, etc. By processing the result through Valhalla Shimmer while modulating the reverb size, I obtained weird 'airy' pitch bends. RX De-reverb to 'fight' against the reverb and obtain strange, phasey textures, then some processing in SerumFX (overdriven filters, distortion, stereo widening) and some multiband compression to beef up the sound. Then I used Cableguys TimeShaper 2 to pitch-bend the sounds even further and create interesting movements. I took one glitchy one-shot from a long 'jamming' session and added a tape stop effect on the tail to make it land on the logo; the reverb aux from the whole mix is also tape-stopped, slightly in advance with a longer curve.
- the pitch-bendy ambiances at the very beginning of the video and the weird stuttery downward-sweep you can hear after the first hit around 01"-02" were made with the same processing; they're small clips from the same 'jamming' sessions layered together to make abstract, moving textures.

Thanks for reading !

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